Hi All,
I've been out of the general loop for quite some time due to personal reasons but I thought I'd give you a little snapshot of the framework/engine (call it what you will) that I've been working on.
"Jengine" (oh how creative) is a fully OpenGL 3.3/4.x 'core' targeted code base that is basically a mash-up of concepts I like from various engines / 3D applications.
So there's no immediate mode people; say goodbye to GLBegin, it's the end for GLEnd, no more ancient fixed function pipeline.
Everything from the UI (JUI for those of you who remember) down to the 3D rendering code is all shader based, utilizing the core profiles of GL3.3/4.x only.
There's no GL2.x/ES code paths for simple reasons : I am but one man. I don't have the time to back-port techniques in the time-frame I'm working to. Plus many techniques including various culling operations are all GPU bound and would require pretty much implementing from scratch all the old CPU methods for such things and finally, I got a new capable graphics card and I do this for my own enjoyment
Ok, here's a screenie of the basic interface, with Terrain, Sky and Camera nodes slapped into the scene-graph :
J - Raster.jpg
The 'Sky' node is capable of various techniques including sky-boxes, domes as well as approximate atmospheric scattering for planetary atmospheres. (still deciding on features here, not sure if I want the engine to render from outer-space so this may be replaced entirely)
The 'Terrain' node is still under development but here you can see a displacement map loaded (height-field) along with textures. Will also supports normal-maps and light-maps in release, but still deciding upon lighting systems to use for the terrain. Anyway, it can page in tiled terrain of theoretically infinite size, what you see here is actually a 32768 x 32768 tiled terrain made up of a single channel 32bit floating point displacment map (for 'Y' resolution) along with a lower resolution tiled diffuse map.
Oh and it uses the latest techniques for tesselation added in GL4.0. Based upon various Nvidia white-papers on the subject, here's a better view of it in operation :
J - Tess Wire.jpg
In the case of GL 3.3, "Jengine" currently just uses a lower resolution mesh than is produced by the tessellation which matches the GL 4.0 performance on my system.
If I end up implementing a classic LOD scheme then I'm not sure what to go for yet.
I'd make the engine exclusively GL4.x but it's pretty much only the tesselation I'm using so far and it seems a shame to cut out so many 3.3 cards just for that.
Anyway, there's tons of other stuff that I won't go into detail about just yet that include : MRT deferred render, full GPU skinning (skeletal animation), Variance Shadow Maps, Physics intergration (currently using newton) as well as all the sandwich fillings like a streaming virtual file system, networking (*anything* in the engine can be serialized) font sub-system, compositing manager for future effects, OpenAL and Path-finding / Steering algorithms (I've ported+improved open-steer) to mention a few.
---
JUI (the windowing interface) has come along in leaps and bounds. Everything or nothing about it can be threaded, it has loads more widgets and also makes use of an FBO rendering mode that in turn allows for full compositing aka compiz on posix systems.
Utilizing FBO's and minimizing re-draws solves many problems, but that's another story
Hope you're all well!
Johnny
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks